Are more professional women going sans makeup?This Financial Times piece claims so, though whether Cherie Blair being photographed on occasion without makeup hardly seems like a trend piece. Plus, as the article itself points out, "no-makeup makeup" is often a get-out-of-double-bind-free card for professional women—maybe Blair was wearing tasteful moisturizer?

Find your favorite discontinued products:Nice MyDaily piece on how to track down, say, THE WORLD'S MOST MAGICAL CONCEALER THAT PRESCRIPTIVES STOPPED MAKING BEFORE THE ENTIRE LINE SHUT DOWN COMPLETELY EXCEPT FOR A CRUDDY WEBSITE THAT DOESN'T HAVE THE ONE AND ONLY PERFECT CONCEALER IN EXISTENCE, but enough about me. I would add in a tip that my beauty editor pal passed on to me: Find out what the parent company is and look at other items in their product family—chances are they used the same chemist in all lines and the colors and some formulas will match somewhere, assuming you were using a product from a major line. (Via Beauty Schooled.)

Baaaaad news for Australian cosmetics? With the outsourcing of sheep's wool (75% of the country's haul is now being sent to China for processing) comes the outsourcing of the wool's grease, or lanolin, a major player in many cosmetics. "For me, lanolin is the hero of a product," says the inventor of LanoLips balm. (I tried to figure out how to make the "o" in hero a heart but couldn't figure it out.)

The dropping of Kirstie Alley:Ragen Chastain at Dances With Fat takes down the "fat lady falling!" snickers surrounding Kirstie Alley's Dancing With the Stars routine. An excellent illumination of the codes we attach to different body sizes.

Pretty pretty Poland:Brief but interesting profile of a Polish chemist who clandestinely started her cosmetics company in the Communist era. At article's end, she notes that there's still a lingering bias against Polish products, despite the country's legacy of major beauty names (Helena Rubenstein, Max Factor).